Counting the Cost
by Shirerose
Summary: It takes a peculiar brand of courage to save your race from destruction and forget that they were saved. Indeed not just forget but remember destroying them instead, to willingly think yourself a monster so that they can live.
Nota Bene: I really enjoyed the Day of the Doctor and unlike some people I never felt that it took away the sense of anguish and darkness that had been present since we first discovered that Gallifrey had been destroyed. Rather it took that pathos and anguish and shaped it into something even better. There is something so beautiful and heartbreaking in the idea that someone willing to destroy their own people for the sake of the universe gets a chance to save them, but at the cost of believing that he has committed genocide.

This is more a philosophical fairy-tale than a story but then isn't that Dr Who all over?

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 **Counting the Cost**

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There is an old story still remembered on the edges of the universe and in distant hidden pockets of obscure nebula. Some cultures consider it to be the greatest of all tragedies, indeed this is the general consensus among scholars. A tragedy as defined by an old Earth philosopher who has long since been relegated to the dusty corners of bookshelves (more's the pity) is the story of a great man, a hero who is brought low due to some fatal flaw. More often than not (in traditional tragedies) this flaw is pride or predestination or a pleasing combination of the two.

This of course brings us to our tragedy. Suppose that there was a world, an ancient, wise and powerful race who were lords of time. They could feel the turning of the worlds and the spin of the stars and time was as tangible to their touch as water is to ours. But just as water can slip through our fingers and be lost in the dust so time slipped through theirs and when their last great war was fought they could see no way to win.

They fought on hopelessly and the world was torn to shreds about them as they fought. Time stretched and broke and folded back on itself and in the end whether they won or lost creation would never be the same again. Among their number was one who was more alive to the touch of the stars and glory of distant worlds than any other. He had stood before kings and empresses, monsters and megalomaniacs and he had stood before them weaponless and won. Now he came back to his people (for he had run away from their pride and power and stuffiness) and fought.

He had held the Key to Time and he had worn the Crown of the Lord President and he felt the twisting shattering timelines more keenly than any other and in his desperation he found a way to stop the war.

Or rather he found two ways, two paths with different results and the same consequence. He could use the greatest and worst weapon that would ever exist and destroy the war, killing everyone. Or he could lock away his own people safe but lost to him and the enemy would destroy themselves.

Upon first glance this seems to be the easiest choice that could ever end such an intergalactic war. And like many first glances it would be wrong. Because the man who held this choice was a doctor, a healer and even as he fought in the war he never fully forgot that (though he often thought he did). He was not harmless or even safe but he was compassionate and he loved life wherever and whenever he found it.

He disliked power and pomp and though he often seemed arrogant he was deep inside in the secret places of his hearts quite humble. He was a father and a grandfather and perhaps as a consequence of this he loved all children with an intense and wonderful love. Most of all he had a severe streak of heroic self-sacrifice (which is not nearly as awful as selfish people make it out to be.) It was this last that serves as the great flaw in this tragedy.

This then is where the scholars' opinions diverge, since sacrifice of oneself for others does not seem a candidate for tragic flawness unless you consider death to be the greatest of all evils. There are some who think this, they are generally selfish, cowardly and have an annoying tendency to survive everything. For the sake of argument we will dispense with this group, metaphorically rendering them human with the aid of a fob watch and sending them to the end of the universe.

The reason for this mess of philosophical and moral inquiry is the consequence the Timelord faced at the end of both choices. Whether he destroyed his people or saved them he would die, temporarily and when he woke remember killing them all.

This then was the crux of the choice, the tragedy if you will. To kill and justly remember having done so or to save everyone and remember quite unjustly and cruelly that he had killed them.

The Timelord being who he was spent very little time thinking about this, though there were three versions of him present at the time so perhaps in a way he had a lifetime of thinking it over. For someone whose whole life was wrapped up in a mission to heal and comfort and save regardless of consequences to self, there was in the end no choice at all. So he saved his people and took on the accumulated weight of the death of two races. It bent and broke him over the years as the load of guilt grew heavier with each new death that he could not prevent but deep inside he always found the strength to go on, perhaps the sole gift granted him by his forgotten innocence.

Scholars of the Neo-Smijonian school argue that these circumstances make it the perfect tragedy because the hero falls and yet remains innocent, suffers and remains guiltless, is flawed and yet is virtuous because of that very flaw. This is all well and good since it is only a story to them, a matter for academic discussion rather than something to be lived and suffered. And the truth is that reality is often stranger and more painful than literature.

And there was a man who had on occasion had contact with these distant corners of creation who was living it, who suffered all the anger and horror and self-loathing of a good man forced into that almost impossible choice.

It should be mentioned in passing that scholars of the Eridian bent (which is far more obscure) believe that the story is not a tragedy at all and that one day in the future (or perhaps it was in the past) the Timelord would remember and have rest from the burden of his guilt and that he would be reunited with his own kind again someday.

It is considered indelicate to be the voice of gloom amid hope but even among the Eridians there is dissent, a sizable minority pointing out that should he remember and one day find his people it is unlikely to be as wonderful as it sounds given that in general the Timelords are a notoriously ungrateful lot.

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Neo-Smijonian stands for New (Neo) Smith (Smi) John (jon)...it sounds a bit silly but than so does Raxacoricofallapatorius.

Eridian is a shortened form of Eridanus which is the constellation _River..._ after a certain archaeologist who got her doctorate in the Doctor.


End file.
